The Tuesday TED talk - work/life balance

(And the link if your browser will not show the video is  here)

It had been on my mind for a while. In fact for the last couple of years I was questioning the long term viability of my lifestyle as a teacher. I am not the only one, it seems.  Surveys show primary school teachers (in the UK) working an average of 59.3 hours a week! My own estimates seemed about the same. The premise is this: if you want to be more than just an average teacher, if you truly want to add value to your lessons and facilitate good quality learning at (almost) every lesson, then you need to work at it! 

Again, for a few years I relished it. I love my job, and working with kids, though tough, can be intensely rewarding. I want to be good at it, not because it makes me feel better, but because it can make a difference to someone else's life. Good teachers do matter (to an extent). So I rationalised the long hours, thinking of the long holiday payback. "Yes, I might work 60 hour weeks, but I do get 12 weeks of holiday in the year." That was the thinking. 

Only then, when actually calculating my holiday I realised that for at least 6 of those I was working. Not in the classroom, granted. And the work was much easier than 7 periods of teaching each day. But it was still work. And, here's the crux, it often kept me awake at night. Plus, did I really want to live for only 1/5 of the year? Did I want to always wait for the holiday, in order to see my husband, enjoy long walks, have time to read and write?

I watched this TED talk a while after I had decided to take a sabattical. I watched it after I had asked for it and it had been approved, and after I had started my search for a more viable career. The problem is: I love teaching. I think it is worthwhile, interesting, varied, meaningful. To me that is what a career should be. So where does one find balance?

A quick personal survey and scan of several teacher online-fora indicated that a huge amount of teachers in the UK have found a way to balance work and life. And that way has been working part time. It has been increasingly the trend in schools across the country for teachers to job-share and it sounds like a brilliant idea to me too - all the pleasures of the job, less burn out! 

Yet, we live in Greece. And Greece of the crisis is a very different place to the UK. In a country where youth unemployment rates are above 50% (56 to be exact) and that jobs are hard to come by and when they are there, they are highly competitive and badly paid, I dared to utter the words: "I want a work/life balance!" 

Chaos and attack ensued from various sources, including my family. It was blasphemy: I had such a good job, why would I leave it? Why would I give up part of my salary to have more time? What is work/life balance anyway? 

To be continued... (have to go to work, you see)

The Tuesday TED talk

Ok, here's this week's TED talk. It's short, even shorter than last week's, so no excuses.

It's a topic very close to my heart. This post about why it's ok to go to bed at 10 is all about it. And the Extra Hour can only be productive because I have had a full night's sleep. (If for some reason my sleep was not as long as it should have been, like last night, I will often make the executive call to stay off the training bike and sleep in for another 40 minutes.)

 I am sick of the kudos attached to no sleep. I want to push towards the culture change of admiting that being fully rested is when we work at our best. Of equating driving after little or no sleep, to driving drunk. I want my surgeon to have had a full night's sleep. Same with my pilot. And if I had kids in school, I would certainly would rather their teacher was fully rested...

Here Arianna Huffington talks about the culture change. What do you think? Can we be part of the change? 

The Tuesday TED talk

I love listening to TED talks. I usually do so while sitting on my turbo trainer (for those not familiar with cyclist-lingo, this is the contraption that one clips their bike onto in order to turn it into a stationary bike... the potential for boredom is immense).

I tend to train in the morning (that Extra Hour I have often raved about) and I love that I can do my exercise and get exciting, useful, innovative ideas at the same time. It really starts my day with a bang and gets me all inspired! The format suits me well too, I only have 30 minutes or so to get it all in, so I usually manage to watch two of these videos during my morning session.

From now on, on Tuesdays I would like to share one of the TED talks that I have recently listened to that has made a difference to me: that has changed the way I think about something. 

Here is today's: 

(The link does not work in some browsers so here's another link, the old fashioned way How to Make Stress your Friend)

Kelly McGonigal is a health psychologist from Stanford University. This fourteen minutes should change the way you think about stress forever, and, as the evidence she presents shows, that alone, your perception of stress, can be one of the major factors of whether stress affects you negatively or not. I think it is a very powerful message, so, if you can spare 14 minutes, watch this!